The Parlor: Why We Love This "Neo New Haven" Style Pizza in Stratford

The Rolling Roni - red sauce, pepperoni, garlic, sriracha, and finished with cold jalapeño whipped ricotta

On the day I stopped by The Parlor to interview Mackenzie Carey, I remember him pausing during our initial chit chat.

“You know, today (August 20) is our sixth anniversary,” he says. “My staff just told me.”

Six years is better than good, considering Carey, who’s Stratford born and raised, had a completely different career and had never spent a single day working in a restaurant prior to getting into the pizza business.

“This oven came from Italy; it was a kit and it comes FedExed in pieces, so we had to build it,” Carey recalls. “You freak out because it’s like, how am I gonna put this together? You hire plumbers, an electrician, a masonry guy, and $10,000 later…you have an oven! It’s expensive to open a restaurant.”

“I’ve never done this before,” he says. “I did strength and conditioning and personal training in Greenwich, one-on-one training. A few of my clients were Allan Houston and his family and Lara Spencer. The common denominator going back-and-forth to and from Greenwich twice a day for six years was me eating pizza.”

When the Jerry’s Shakespeare Pizza space became available, Carey threw in with a couple partners, renovated it, had an Italian brick oven kit shipped in and built, and came up with the name because they simply couldn’t decide or agree on anything else and they “didn’t hate it,” so The Parlor was it.

“We asked a lawyer about it and there’s like way over 100 parlor pizzas, plus, no one said no, and no one’s sued us yet, and there’s a nuance since there’s places called Parlor Pizza and we’re The Parlor: A Pizza Joint,” he says.

Early in The Parlor’s inception, there were some things to solve for Carey, namely, his partners and then, somehow obtaining the recipe for their new age take on New Haven style pizza dough.

“I was supposed to be a silent partner, but it didn’t stay that way,” Carey explains. “It was evident that my partners were not going to do a good job and that I wasn’t going to stay silent. Four months in, I bought them out.”

Hand cut fries! And Carey’s suggestion? Get yours with house made honey mustard. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it!

Fried mozzarella with your choice of red sauce or pesto, or how about both?

The Parlor’s wings come in smoky BBQ, firecracker buffalo, honey sriracha (pictured), honey mustard, or dry rub. On their food trucks, wings are wood fired, but at the restaurant, it’s simply too busy for the oven to do anything other than pizza.

But there was more to figure out after that, so Carey hired someone to teach his girlfriend how to keep the books, then he had to solve the mystery of what was in the pizza dough since their opening day chef would not reveal the recipe.

“He came on at the beginning from Da Legna, so the dough is loosely based off of that,” Carey says. “But he was super secretive about what’s in the dough. He’d keep cups with all the dry ingredients in them, but wouldn’t tell me or anyone else what was in them. One week I grabbed one, another week, another week, and I brought it up to a lab in Milford that was able to unlock the dough recipe.” 

Once all of that was settled, Carey and The Parlor went full steam ahead, earning high marks for their pizza and overall menu.

The pizza, described by Carey as Neo New Haven, is sort of this hybrid of New Haven style meets Neapolitan. The dough is baked at New Haven temperatures, between 590 and 625 degrees, for 3-5 minutes, but there’s more fermentation time. New Haven dough typically rests for a day or less, while The Parlor’s gets a minimum fermentation of 48 hours and as many as 72, plus, they use a starter, something not typical of New Haven style. The result is a more flavorful dough with more structure, and it’s light, not just in thinness, but in digestibility.

Each 12-incher can be customized to your liking, or, you can try one of The Parlor’s signature pies, some of which are The Rolling Roni (red sauce, pepperoni, garlic, jalapeño whipped ricotta, honey sriracha), their popular The Loaded Potato (mashed potatoes, mozzarella, cheddar, bacon, sour cream, chives), their namesake in The Parlor (red sauce, onion, garlic, soppressata, mozzarella, buffalo mozzarella, cherry peppers, truffle honey), or their rendition of a classic margherita, only with the addition of garlic.

The Loaded Potato

In addition to their signature pies, The Parlor has six vegan pies to choose from as well.

But there’s more. A while back in an unrelated article, there was a phrase, “the evolution of the neighborhood slice shop, minus the slices.” The Parlor is just that. It’s an unfussy menu of pizzeria fare. Besides pizza, think along the lines of wings, fries, fried mozzarella, garlic bread, a few salads.

But here’s the catch. The Parlor makes everything. Nothing is coming out of a bag or a jar, OK, so maybe the Heinz Ketchup, but that’s literally it.

Sauces are homemade, as are the dressings. The meatballs are scratch made. The wings are brined for 24 hours before they’re baked, then fried crispy, and sauced. The fries are hand cut, blanched in salt water for a day, then fried to order, and tossed with salt, pepper, and parsley.  

But The Parlor’s standards don’t stop with the food. For Carey, he’s taken his personal training touch and applied it to his pizzeria.

Don’t let his name fool you! Carey is Italian. Those pictures on the walls are family photos, including one of him and his grandmother making marinara.

“I talk to my customers,” he says. “If there’s a problem, you fix, you replace, and we try to get people their food as fast as we can. Even with my employees, I want to get to know them I’m a big people person and I love human interaction. We’re not on UberEats because I want that face-to-face and I don’t want my food arriving cold or in someone’s dirty car that might smell like smoke. If someone goes on vacation, customers or whomever, we ask them how it was. Remembering those little details about people’s lives is important. We wake up with the mentality that we’re not gonna suck—you can’t work somewhere all these hours and not want to be as good as you can be.”

And all of this, up to this point, has Carey thinking about the future. Three years after opening, The Parlor launched its first pizza trailer, followed by a second one this past November that gives them the opportunity to pop up at local festivals, private parties and weddings, and lots of charity events.

“I was blessed at the start of this because we brought on some talented people and we’ve met cool pizza people through this place,” Carey says. “We’ve been at the (Hartford Healthcare) Amphitheater and find ourselves in cool spots like animal sanctuaries and weddings. We’re also honored to do the Vicki Soto 5K. She was from Stratford and I went to school with her siblings.”

Carey’s ideas for expansion—not including him taking over a local auto shop, Finn Motor Company (he’s changing the name)—may involve one of the trailers, if he can find a permanent space to park it.

“A satellite location for a trailer is a goal because it’s annoying to move it all the time, so if I can find a Copps Island situation (where they’re often times parked at the marina) where I park it and leave it until I need it, that’s ideal. I’d also love to buy the building where we are. It’s all a learning curve and I want to keep expanding.”

999 Stratford Avenue, Stratford
203.522.5055, theparlorjoint.co/